The BR-1860 Series 2P00 Dual Port Fabric Adapter with Gen 5 Fiber Channel from QLogic meets all the connectivity needs of cloud-enabled data centers while providing unmatched performance, application-aware services, unified management, and reduced cost and complexity. It is a simple and flexible server connectivity adapter designed to extend fabric services to VMs and applications in highly demanding virtualized environments. Centralized management is through single pane-of-glass by integration with Brocade Network Advisor, and consolidates I/O devices and optimizes QoS with QLogic vFLink technology

Delivering full-duplex line-rate 16 Gb/s fiber channel and 10GbE speeds, and over one million IOPS per dual-port adapter for storage applications including fiber channel, FCoE, and iSCSI, the QLogic BR-1860 is a suitable platform to support mission-critical workloads in the large data centers. The BR-1860 supports full FCoE protocol offload as well as stateless networking offloads for 10GbE, including TCP checksum and segmentation offloads for improved performance and more efficient CPU utilization.The BR-1860 is a class of adapters that combines a Gen 5 fiber channel host bus adapter with a 10-gigabit Ethernet (GbE) converged network adapter and a NIC to support native fiber channel, TCP/IP, data center bridging (DCB) Ethernet, fiber channel over Ethernet (FCoE), and iSCSI running simultaneously.

Designed for the Private Cloud

Virtualization is transforming the data center, essentially moving the access layer of the network into the server.By implementing virtual machine optimized ports (VMOPs), the BR-1860 leverages hypervisor multi-queue technologies such as VMware NetQueue and Microsoft VMQ to offload the incoming network packet classification and sorting tasks from the hypervisor onto the adapter, freeing the CPU and enabling line-rate performance.

I/O Virtualization (IOV) and Virtual Switching

The BR-1860 supports QLogic virtual Fabric Link (vFLink) technology, which partitions a single adapter into as many as eight virtual adapters called vNICs. This is done in the hardware by using multiple physical functions (PFs) at the PCIe bus level, appearing as separate physical devices at the OS level. These virtual links can be assigned minimum and/or maximum bandwidth levels allocated in 100 Mb/s increments, with a maximum of 10Gb/s for Ethernet. This helps organizations overcome the proliferation of adapters in virtual environments while maintaining management isolation and quality of service (QoS) for different types of networks, including production, backup, management, or live migration.

The BR-1860 will help organizations overcome this limitation through its ability to support PCI-SIG single root input/output virtualization (SR-IOV), which extends QLogic vFLink technology to support up to 255 virtual fabric links. SR-IOV utilizes PCIe virtual functions (VFs), which are lightweight PCI functions that are assigned to the VMs while the hypervisor retains control of the underlying PF. SR-IOV enables an efficient sharing of I/O devices for VMs as well as direct I/O for increased performance. It also incorporates a built-in virtual Layer 2 Ethernet switch, or virtual Ethernet bridge (VEB), to offload the hypervisor from all of the interVM traffic switching tasks, delivering better network performance for VMs while freeing the CPU for additional application processing.

Extend Fabric Services to the Server and Applications

The BR-1860 supports Brocade's Server Application Optimization (SAO) technology to extend the intelligence and fabric services of Brocade fiber channel fabrics into servers. N_Port trunking extends the ISL trunking capability from the Brocade switches into the server, combining two 16Gb/s links in a dual-port adapter into a single logical 32 Gb/s connection with frame-level load balancing for unmatched levels of performance and fault tolerance.

Brocade SAO also extends QoS from the fabric to the VM and application level, enabling organizations to virtualize mission-critical applications and scale virtualization environments.

By supporting Windows Server 2012, the BR-1860 enhances its ability to support Windows-based virtual workloads and provides network administrators with policy-based tools to manage traffic on the virtual and physical networks. Furthermore, support of the Hyper-V virtual fiber channel feature enables direct connectivity to fiber channel SANs from within a Hyper-V VM, allowing fiber channel SANs to support Windows based virtualized workloads. Support for fiber channel in Hyper-V guests also includes support for many high-availability features, such as virtual SANs, clustered VMs, live migration, and multipath I/O (MPIO).

The BR-1860 enables administrators to specify network bandwidth controls based on application type, users, and servers for the physical network. In addition, support of Hyper-V QoS enables cloud hosting providers and enterprises to deliver predictable network performance for multiple types of traffic for VMs.

Simplifying Server Deployment with Dynamic Fabric Provisioning

Dynamic fabric provisioning (DFP) allows organizations to eliminate fabric re-configuration when adding or replacing servers through the virtualization of host worldwide names (WWNs). It combines Brocade switch and QLogic adapter technology to reduce or eliminate the need to modify zoning or LUN masking.

Centralized Adapter Management

QLogic's Host Connectivity Manager (HCM) is an easy-to-use adapter management tool for configuring, monitoring, and troubleshooting the QLogic BR-1860 series adapters. HCM enables server administers to quickly configure BR-1860 series adapters locally or remotely. HCM scans the SAN environment to discover visible storage resources and display target LUNs and provides fast access to the managed host bus adapters, converged network adapters, ports, and target storage resources. HCM also provides notifications of various conditions and problems through a user-defined event filter. In addition to providing a graphical interface, QLogic also provides a command line interface, BCU CLI, for scripting and task automation.

QLogic HCM is tightly integrated with Brocade Network Advisor (BNA) to provide end-to-end configuration and management of the entire SAN infrastructure.